


Man's Best Friend

by writerblocked



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: F/M, Gen, darcy is allergic to cats, this is going to end well, tony wants to adopt a pet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 22:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerblocked/pseuds/writerblocked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony wants to get a pet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Man's Best Friend

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jdphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/gifts).



> This is the fic I owe JD for losing our bet. I hope she can forgive me for the horror I'm about to unleash on her.

Once Tony Stark gets an idea, it’s kind of hard for him to get rid of it. Once a person realizes this, quite a few things about him start to make sense. The AI housekeeper, for example. The multitude of vintage-slash-customized-slash-vintage- _and_ -customized cars in his garage. The great big honking suit that he whizzes around in saving the day and showing up all the other chumps who ever dared win an award in anything ever.

 

Most of the people in his life know about this little quirk of his. Most of the people in his life are fairly good at informing newcomers of what makes Tony so _absolutely special_. And, of course, most of the people in his life avoid thinking too loudly when he’s around.

 

And then there’s Thor.

 

-

 

It starts out quite simply, really.

 

Thor comes back from a trip to Asgard absolutely covered in cat hair and waltzes into the _Science!_ lab, which makes Darcy start sneezing like _whoa_. Her face swells up considerably—to the point where she’s having difficulty seeing—when Thor tries to see if she’s alright. The scene spins out of control quite rapidly from there with Jane screaming somewhat ineffectually into her phone at a very unfortunate 911 operator and Bruce trying to decipher the frantic hand gestures that Darcy is making. Finally, it’s Tony that gets the gist of what Darcy’s trying to say and he quickly upends her purse. He finds the syringe, jams it into her leg, and all is well.

 

 _Somehow_ this fiasco turns into a conversation about childhood pets.

 

Darcy, whose face has shrunk down considerably with the help of a cool compress and some hydrocortisone cream, starts it off with, “Sorry, Thor, I’m… not much of a cat person.”

 

Jane, who’s been urging her to lay down, snorts indelicately. “Yeah, I never would have guessed that,” she says. She pushes Darcy to sit down on the couch in the lab that Tony would probably sleep in more often than his bed if it weren’t for Pepper and urges her to lie on her back. She continues, “Anyone who’s spent longer than twenty minutes with you has heard at least one story about Gary the wonder dog.”

 

“Hey, Gary is awesome,” Darcy shoots back. She settles into a sitting position and refuses to be swayed further. “And you have no room to talk, okay? You were, like, constantly telling stories about your ugly Persian cat that you had to give to your parents when you moved to New Mexico because the fat little bastard wouldn’t do well in the heat.”

 

Tony’s eyebrows go up at that. “ _You_ had a Persian cat? Those things are so high-maintenance. Sometimes you have to be reminded to put on _pants_.”

 

“Yeah, well, some of us weren’t writing research reports when we were seven and I didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked him out at the pound,” Jane says. There’s a huffy tone to her voice and her nose is starting to rise in the air in what they all recognize as her Defense Mode. Thankfully, Thor puts a stop to it by wrapping a humungous arm around her shoulders and dragging her closer to him.

 

“I understand your pain,” he says, a bit softer than expected. “I do not like leaving Snufflebottoms—” He does his poor best to ignore Tony’s strangled laughter. “—in Asgard, but he is my mother’s cat more than my own and to separate them would be cruel.” Jane’s smile is slightly hesitant, but she leans into him and seems to deflate and Darcy heaves a sigh of relief before she turns to Bruce.

 

“What about you, Doc? Any pets when you were younger?”

 

His mouth twitches faintly in a semi-smile before he shakes his head. “No, not when I was a kid. I had a cockatiel when I was in college and spent the better part of a year trying to teach him to recite Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

 

“How did that work out?” Jane asks, curiosity piqued.

 

He sighs. “My roommate had better luck teaching him to swear.”

 

Tony, understandably, can no longer hold in his laughter. The other four give him looks in varying degrees of exasperation and resigned acceptance as he attempts to catch his breath. “Ohhh,” he moans, holding his stomach. In a voice that one might crudely imagine a cockatiel to sound like, he says, “An object at rest will— _fuck_ —remain at rest unless— _shit shit shit_ —acted on by an unbalanced force.”

 

“Oh, shut up,” Jane says, crumpling up a not-quite-blank sheet of graph paper and throwing it at his head. “Didn’t you have any ridiculous pets growing up?”

 

He dodges the paper with the practice of a frequent target and gives her a look kind of like _Are you seriously asking me that question?_ When she doesn’t look away or retract the question, he rolls his eyes. “No, I didn’t have any pets growing up. Didn’t really have the time.”

 

The silence that follows that statement is deafening and awkward. Tony sniffs, clearly unhappy with the sudden change in atmosphere, and turns away from them to inspect something lying on a desk behind him. Thor, being the god of thunder and enemy to all silences, awkward or otherwise, is the one to break it first.

 

He claps a mighty hand down on Tony’s shoulder and it’s only the grace of good fortune that keeps his knees from buckling. “Well, maybe you should think about procuring yourself a pet now that you _do_ have time,” he says. “You will never know what you are missing if you don’t endeavor to correct it!”

 

\--

 

At the time, of course, Tony simply shrugs the idea off. A pet is one of the many things he really doesn’t have time to think about now—he actually can’t blame his father for that now that he’s an adult. Pepper, for all that she’s the most perfect human being on the planet, still has to have him sign off on about thirty percent of what Stark Industries does these days (though she thankfully hasn’t asked him to come in to the office since the Christmas party last year). Modifications to the suit are an ongoing process, especially now that he has team members that can help him test it.

 

And yet Thor’s words echo in his mind whenever he’s not actively trying to think of something else.

 

“What do you think about getting a pet?” he asks Pepper one night. It’s one of those where she has saved him from the couch in his lab, primarily through trickery and bribes of extremely hot sex—not that he’s complaining. Her skin is still damp and her hair itches a little where it’s fanned over his arm.

 

She pauses in snuggling closer to him, hand curled around the reactor. She looks up at his face with some amount of incredulity and he realizes that maybe he could have picked a better moment for that question. “ _Please_ tell me that isn’t innuendo for something,” she says finally. The deadpan way she says it makes Tony immediately burst into laughter as he shakes his head. She chuckles hesitantly along with him, still minorly confused. Finally, she seems to accept that this is just Tony being Tony. “Okay, then,” she says slowly. “Why do you want a pet?”

 

He shrugs a little, lifting her head with the motion. “I dunno,” he says. “I never had one as a kid, and I thought maybe now would be a good time to think about it…”

 

The silence that he’d experienced into the lab creeps up on them. He really should have picked a better time to broach this topic; a time when running away was an option. He doesn’t like the look in her eyes now. Soft and thoughtful and, ugh, _sad_. He always hates it when she looks sad.

 

“Forget it,” he says shortly, turning his body away. He does it gently so as not to jostle her too much and that seems to break her out of her thoughts. She rolls toward his back and buries her face into the curve of his shoulder. She doesn’t say anything and he should really be concentrating more on ignoring her than the way her breath hits him right in the crook of his neck, or reminding himself that she’s _probably_ doing this on purpose. She shifts closer again, so all their lines are pressed together. Scratch that, she’s definitely doing this on purpose.

 

“We could always ask JARVIS to look into animal adoption centers,” she says, voice soft and caring.

 

Then begins to nuzzle that hot spot on his neck and he forgets what they were talking about.

 

\--

 

The next day, looking for some notes he made in college that will help with an experiment Jane is working on, he finds an old fossil from a dig his uncle did in Argentina.

 

\--

 

Darcy comes marching into the lab a few days after that and spots him sitting next to Bruce.

 

“You!” she yells, pointing at him. For a moment, he’s actually frightened by the look on her face. The last time someone was this angry at him was—okay, it was with Pepper this morning, but she was also naked and so that kind of detracted from the scary. Darcy just looks furious. “You complete _ASSHOLE_!”

 

She slaps a large sheet of paper down on the table and for a moment he’s unable to comprehend what he’s seeing. Darcy crosses her arms over her chest with a huff as he examines it. On first glance, it looks like a crude blueprint of Stark—er, Avengers Tower. His eyebrows climb up his forehead, though, when he sees the title of the document.

 

“Velociraptor Escape Plan?” he says, disbelieving even as he reads it again. “You have a velociraptor _escape plan_?”

 

Bruce is looking it over now, nodding at some points and frowning at others. “This is actually… scarily thought out.”

 

“A _velociraptor escape plan_ ,” Tony says again. He looks up at Darcy, expecting to see her laughing her ass off or at the very least smirking. Her face is set in a deadly serious expression. “Jurassic Park did a number on you, didn’t it?” He looks down at the notes scrawled messily in the margins of the blueprint, detailing different plans to get out of the building. His mouth drops open. “I _die_ in plan G?”

 

Darcy waves him off. “Yes, but it’s all heroic and manly because you save Pepper and your unborn child.”

 

“Pepper’s _pregnant_?”

 

“In plan G,” Bruce says, having reached that point. He skims further. “And in plan L. And N, O, and P.”

 

Tony rubs a hand over his face, past shock now and gone straight into exasperation. “What prompted this, if it’s not too much to ask?” he asks, leaning back in his seat

 

“Jane said you found a dinosaur fossil and were going to clone one as your pet and I wanted to inform you that if you did, you would die no less than fourteen times in fourteen different gruesome ways.” She taps the paper sharply with her fingernail. “And if they don’t happen, I’ll murder you myself.”

 

He groans and collapses on top of the blueprint.

 

\--

 

Thor approaches him with a scroll after lunch. It took two full hours to convince Darcy that he was only joking when he showed Jane the fossil and that it was not (yet) possible to create a dinosaur from it—and even if he did, he would wait until she was out of the tri-state area to unleash the horror on New York. So he really isn’t looking forward to Thor trying to explain to him why a Bilchsteim would make a terrible pet.

 

“I have thought long and hard, but I think these names might meet your approval,” Thor says before Tony can work up a good snark. He spreads the scroll on the table and gestures for him to look.

 

“ _Fridtjof?_ ” Tony reads aloud, sure he’s mangling it even as he does so. “Healfdene? What the hell kind of names are these?”

 

Thor nods and smiles widely, oblivious to the insult in Tony’s words or studiously ignoring them—he still can’t tell. “These are names that we give our children in Asgard. They are strong names for strong warriors.”

 

“I can see that,” Tony says after a long moment of silence. He gives Thor a sharp look. “Is Jane pregnant? Because I doubt she’d approve of, like, three-thirds of this list. And I’m really not the best person to go to for baby naming. Or anything involving babies, actually.” He studiously does _not_ think of the scare Darcy and Bruce gave him this morning.

 

His friend, however, blinks for a moment and then bursts into raucous laughter. He claps Tony on the shoulder and this time his knees do buckle, though he does his best to hide it. He smiles thinly as Thor wipes tears of mirth from his cheeks.

 

“No, Tony, Jane is not pregnant,” Thor says. “She insists upon using the rubber sheaths you call ‘condoms’ as she is not ready to have a child.” Ohhh, he _really_ didn’t need that mental image. “These are suggestions for your pet! Pepper told me you were thinking of procuring one.”

 

Oh. Well that’s a relief. Tony nods in understanding and looks over the list again.

 

“Thor, I really hate to break it to you… but these are _really bad_.”

 

\--

 

Pepper returns home after a business trip in Bali to find a sea turtle tied to the bedpost.

 

She doesn’t scream, or spill coffee on her custom-tailored Hugo Boss blazer, or even wonder what the _ever-loving_ hell it’s doing there. What she does end up doing is turning right back around and beginning the hunt for her not-husband. (Which, admittedly, isn’t so much a hunt as a march for the _Science!_ lab.)

 

“Why is there a sea turtle tied to our bed?” she asks without any preamble. Tony, who’d watched her come in with a smirk on his face, immediately bursts into a grin.

 

“What do you think?” he asks. “Don’t you love her? I’m going to name her Debra.”

 

Pepper takes a deep, calming breath. “When you said you were going to get a pet, I thought it was going to be a dog. Or a cat. Something… normal.”

 

“Darcy’s allergic to cats. And who wants a _normal_ pet, anyway? They’re boring.” He fiddles with the edge of a blueprint of the Tower. There’s something about velociraptors scrawled along the top and Pepper decides she really, really doesn’t want to know.

 

She clears her throat and Tony’s eyes snap up to hers. It’s fairly clear that he really does want her—belated—approval on this. “She gets her own living space that isn’t in our bedroom. A tank, with seawater. And you have to feed her and take care of whatever messes she makes. No fobbing it off on other people, especially me. Do you understand?”

 

Tony scoffs at her stipulations, but nods and reaches around the table for her hands. After a moment he says, “Promise me that you’ll tell me if you’re pregnant _before_ I start trying to clone a velociraptor out of a fossil.”

 

“ _What?_ ”


End file.
